CIVILIAN DEFENSE: Fine Fettle

With the imminent possibility of a Jap bombing raid hanging over their heads, San Franciscans last week felt a strange, pleasant exhilaration. Oldtimers who saw the 1906 earthquake said that nothing the Japs could do would compare with that. Ever-optimistic Mayor Angelo J. Rossi said: “Why worry? No bombs have fallen!”

City-dwellers, only fairly prepared for night raids, poorly prepared for day raids (when Japs usually come), short on defense equipment, still needing 10,000 fire-watchers, nevertheless hoped—in a way—that Jap raiders would come to San Francisco first. They were sure San Franciscans could take it better than Los Angelenos.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles civilians, no sissies either, argued that in a sprawling city like theirs only one in a million could get hurt—so why worry?

Portlanders temporarily stopped wondering where vacation gasoline was coming from, let little thrills teeter up & down their spines. Things were getting as exciting as right after Pearl Harbor. They were miffed when OCD’s James M. Landis said they were behind the East in preparations (Eleanor Roosevelt had said just the opposite), but their complacency was restored when he added that Portland was better prepared than San Francisco and cities to the south. Actually, 75,000 Portlanders are schooled in civilian defense and regularly on the alert, but the other 250,000 peoples are merely excited.

The West Coast awareness of impending drama was something new: it took the place of virtual apathy. As late as last March, civilians shrugged off any preparation as a nuisance. When the returns came in from the Far Pacific, they began to buckle down. When Brigadier General James H. Doolittle raided Tokyo, they worked a little faster, got a little more tense. When War Secretary Stimson predicted Jap face-saving raids as a certainty, civilian volunteers began to hold nightly drills. The Coast went on a 24-hour alert.

But what the people still expected was a thrill. They appeared to watch the preparations like moviegoers in the first reel of a horror movie.

At just the psychological moment, defense workers and cops blossomed out with gas masks. Papers printed rules on what to do in a gas attack. Barrage balloons bumbled in the skies from Vancouver to Mexico (“just like in England”), carefully spotted above war plants that had otherwise been carefully camouflaged. Radios often hummed with the static that meant stations were off the air. Steel helmets appeared. Planes went over at night, even through San Francisco fogs. Reporters learned that they were subject to theArticles of War (whatever they were), “in the event of military action.” Rumors were fed by cancellation of Army weekend leaves and the request that OCD workers stay home on Memorial Day. The War Department increased the general buck fever by asking editors and publishers not to bannerize bombing raids, asking columnists to be casual.

At week’s end most West Coast citizens had no thought of panic. What was there to be panicky about? They were in fine fettle. They tingled. The battle off Midway Island, with its victory for the U.S. Fleet, was great news—but it was news tinged with a certain disappointment. It meant, they thought, that their great day was not yet.